


as we know it

by flyicarus



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-19
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-11-02 04:30:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyicarus/pseuds/flyicarus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world ends on a Monday.</p>
            </blockquote>





	as we know it

The world ends on a Monday, her 200th anniversary of being a vampire, and she thinks  _oh, great_.

Edward’s radio is stuck on repeat, Debussy’s Clair de Lune running in a constant loop and she remembers the day when Edward first played it for her on the piano.

She can’t find Esme and Carlisle. They must have fled, she thinks, like the others. Like the Denali clan and the Egyptians and the Romanians. Like everyone.

She is the only one left.

Flames burn outside the Cullen household, and she cowers in the ceramic bathtub on the second floor. She pulls her knees to her chest and rocks herself back and forth.

She hears someone enter the house. There is no heartbeat. So, she thinks, the world ends on a Monday and I die alone. Edward is gone – Caius’ doing – and all of the others have left. She thanks God that Jacob and Renesmee have gone, that he has taken her somewhere far away where she’ll never hear about what happened in Forks.

She hears the vampire in the house coming up the stairs. It checks the room at the end of the hall first, hers and Edwards, and then moves to the next one over on the left, Alice and Jasper’s. It checks Emmett and Rosalie’s last, and doesn’t even bother checking Esme and Carlisle’s; the door is burst off its hinges and a fire raged there before. Not now.

She hears the vampire pausing outside the bathroom. She pulls the curtain in front of the tub. She prepares to fight, remembering her shield and the way Emmett taught her to fight dirty, Bells and her hands clench into fists. Her marble skin will do enough damage, she thinks, that even after she has died her attacker will remember.

She pulls in an unnecessary breath.

The door opens, and the vampire enters slowly.

She finds that she’s smiling.  _Welcome, death_  she thinks, and leaps through the curtain.

What surprises her is that the vampire she thought had come to kill her, doesn’t fight back. She pushes them both through two walls and they fall to the charred landscape below. She’s on top of him and, when they finally settle, he switches their position and pins her arms above her head.

It’s all too easy and it reminds her of someone. Her grief and anger overshadow her memories. She can’t recall…

She realizes then that the face above her is familiar. That she knows those eyes and that pale skin, but there is no easy smile lingering there now. No joke.

“Bella,” he says. “Bella.”

She gasps. “Emmett!”

She relaxes in his arms, stops fighting. It’s Emmett, she reasons. She is safe, for now at least.

“You came back,” she whispers. Her voice breaks and she knows that if she were still human, her eyes would well up and tears would fall soon after.

“Yes,” he replies, loosening his hold on her wrists but still on top of her. “For you. I came back for you.”

She turns her head away. She can’t bear to look at him now. Not after, oh Rosalie…

“No one else would,” he adds.

She doesn’t dispute that. All of the other vampires had gone long ago, days ago, when they saw the force that the Volturi had amassed to destroy the Cullen clan. Some of them even defected, and she thinks bitterly then of Garrett and Kate, of Siobhan and Kuchiri. Of Jasper and Alice.

He moves off her to sit on the burnt grass, sitting close beside her so that he could still protect her, if she needed.

“Demetri is coming,” he says at length. “We should go.”

She lays still on the ground.

“Why?” Her mouth twists in bitterness. “What good would it do?”

Emmett looks at her, still lost in the end of Rosalie and the departure of the family he had known for almost 300 years. But he knows enough to be sure that Bella is the only one left that he can stay with. That he can protect. Besides, he promised Edward.

“We can make a straight line through the Quileute lands,” he says, ignoring her. “Go into the sea. Demetri can’t track us through that. South America, maybe. Africa. Someplace far.”

Bella stands and walks back towards the house. So he wants to run, she thinks. He wants to run with me. Are we really all that we each have left? She wants to know if he thinks it’s possible that they can escape. She wants to know but she doesn’t, so she doesn’t ask him.

Emmett follows so closely that he was almost her shadow.

It reminds her of Jasper and Alice.

Her heart aches.

She walks into the house and leaps up the broken stairs. Emmett follows, still close to her. She goes into her room, the one at the end of the hall. The room she shared with Edward. Emmett stays in the doorway. He won’t follow her here.

She goes to the bedside table and smashes the picture frame on the floor. She kneels and picks it up, carefully removing the picture therein.

Edward and herself smile in sepia, his arm around her shoulders and her arm thrown easily across his waist. She’s in love, so very in love, in that picture.  _Paris 2108, Bella & Edward_ is scrawled on the back. She holds back a sob and folds the picture, shoving it in the pocket of her jeans. 

She picks up her jacket off of the desk chair that somehow still stands whole and pulls it on over her shirt.

She turns back to Emmett.

“What happens now?” she asks, and it feels like she hasn’t used her voice in years.

(but really, less than a week since the Volturi came. less than a week since her entire world crashed down around her.)

“I don’t know,” he says at length. “I didn’t really plan for this.”

She laughs, but it sounds empty and hollow to her own ears, and she imagines that it must sound the same to him.

“Neither did I.”

He moves cautiously into the room, edging closer to her despite the fact that she shared this with Edward and now Edward is  _gone gone gone_. Gone like Rosalie, gone like Tanya and Zafrina. Gone like the rest of his family. His hand moves slowly towards her forearm, but he flexes it a few times and lets it drop back to his side.

She sees.

“I think the best thing to do,” he says, “is to run. I don’t really care where we go, as long as we’re far enough away from them.”

She knows that he means the Volturi and an involuntary shudder breaks over her body.

He’s closer to her in less than a second, hovering anxiously.

She wants to laugh, because this isn’t Emmett. Not the Emmett that she’s known, at least. But everything is changed now. Why shouldn’t he be different?

She flips Edward’s radio off and lets her hand find his. She squeezes it for only a moment, and moves to let go, but he holds her fast.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Peru,” she says lightly, the meaning behind her words veiled. “And then Chile.”

He nods, and in the split second that they both decide to leave, they’re already running. 

They’re moving out of the house faster than they ever have before.

They rush into the woods, the trees and bushes rushing pass in a blur of green. Her hand clutches his and she knows now that she will never let go. Emmett is all she has left now of her family.

“I won’t leave you,” he murmurs as they run, so low that human ears wouldn’t catch what he’s saying. “It’s just us two now.”

She runs faster and somehow he keeps pace with her. They burst across the border that Ephraim Black’s treaty created, running fierce and hard over Quileute land. She hears a howl as they make their way towards the sea, and she holds Emmett’s hand that much tighter.

She feels the earth move beneath her bare feet and she knows that the wolves are on their way.

“Let’s run, Emmett,” she says. “Let’s run.”

He flashes her a quick smile, not really made from joy but just to let her know he’s there. “I thought that was what we were doing.”

She lets her lips move upward in what might be an answering smile. She’s not sure. She feels like she hasn’t smiled in so long. She probably won’t for a while.

They enter the water so quickly that it creates a massive wave in their wake, spraying back onto the sand. As they move beneath the waves, out and downward, she hears the muted howls of the wolves. Sam’s pack, she thinks.

Demetri won’t find them this way. As skilled a tracker as he is, even he can’t trace two vampires through an ocean. The Volturi will look but they will find nothing. Maybe ages hence, when they’ve stopped running entirely, they’ll see the ones that seek to kill them. And even then, they’ll keep on running.

She and Emmett swim quickly, still holding on to each other’s hands.

He is her brother. He will protect her. After all, he promised Edward.

_The world will end with us_ , she thinks. It will end in fire and ice, but at least they’ll have each other.

And they run, each the other’s world entire.  



End file.
